


Laughing Till I Die

by Thunderhel



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 09:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13187565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunderhel/pseuds/Thunderhel
Summary: Will isn't sure when it happened, but maybe Maine isn't where he calls home anymore.





	Laughing Till I Die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ahausonfire (thisiswherethefishlives)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisiswherethefishlives/gifts).



> Ohhhh man dude. FiRST OF ALL I'm sorry this is so late holy crap. My computer died and everything went downhill from there, but I got it fixed and I'm back in business! Also I'm sorry I took your prompt so loosely. You gave me one really specific prompt and one very vague one, and I went with the latter and I hope it's what you were looking for! 
> 
> The prompt was: I would love to read or see soft!Dex being comfortable and happy with the team. Just... happy Dex, whatever that means to you, platonic or romantic.
> 
> CW: Implied homophobia and Queer being used a slur.

**_12/25/16_**  
The Poindexter kitchen was a cacophony of sound and movement with women moving about in busy circles and dishes both hot and cold rushing by at a dangerously fast pace that had Will leaning this way and that, trying to predict what was the most likely to hit the floor first. Nothing did, but the fear still lingered. 

“Billy!” His aunt Clarice glanced up from the dough she was rolling out, her grin wide and toothy. “What can we do for you?” 

“It’s Christmas!” Aunt Christina told him needlessly, pinching one cheek as she passed by him. “Our young college man should be relaxing with the rest of the boys!”

“What can we do for you sweetheart, we’re pretty busy in here,” his mother told him, her tone gentle, but the reminder was sharp enough without a tone. She wanted him out. 

It wasn’t that big of a deal, he told himself sternly. He had spent nineteen Christmases with his family in this exact fashion, the twentieth shouldn’t have been any different, but his palms were sweating and there was a pounding in his head. He tried to speak but his voice was lost as his cousin dropped a pan in the sink.

“What?” 

“I said, I can help?”

He felt the explosion of laughter that followed was completely unwarranted. It wasn’t hostile or mean, he quickly realized, they just thought he was kidding. One of his cousins rolled her eyes and his grandmother took a gentle swat at him as she passed. 

“Get back out there and stop holding us up!” 

“We love you very much darling, but this dinner is never going to happen if you boys keep trying to make us laugh.” 

For a moment he froze, stuck in the doorway to the kitchen with nothing but sweaty palms and that ringing in his ears. He wanted to tell his cousin that she should add more flour to her rolling pin, and ask his mother what glaze she was using for the ham. 

He didn’t do either. 

Will was laughing when he turned back into the living room. It burned in his throat, and if anyone asked about it, he would have said he was starting to get a cold.

No one asked.

**_1/14/17_ **

Will was exhausted as he ascended the Haus steps. The drive back to Samwell was always a hard hit to just about every part of him, from the cramps in his legs and the crushing boredom of driving so far with nothing but his own shitty music to keep him company. All of his plans for the rest of the day consisted of passing out on his bed and dealing with the rest of unpacking the following day. All of that quickly went out the window, almost the moment he stepped through the door.

“Dex!” There was something jarring, Will thought, about getting used to being Will and Billy again after months of being Dex, only to switch back into it. It took some getting used to, like Will and Billy and Dex might not all be the same person.

Maybe he was just being dramatic. Or maybe he was spending too much time with Nursey.

“Hey Bitty.”

Bitty leaned around the corner, with an oven mitt on his hand and flour on his cheek. “Just who I wanted to see.”

Will raised an eyebrow as Bitty motioned him with his mitted hand to come closer. “Can I put my bags in my room first?”

“There will be plenty of time for that later,” Bitty assured him, disappearing back into the kitchen. 

“I’m assuming there is going to be a whole lot of whatever is happening in the kitchen for the rest of the year too.”

“Oh, hush!”

Despite his protests, Will shifted his bags off of his shoulder and let them lay in a pile at the bottom of the stairs, nudging a strap out of the way with his foot before he made his way into the kitchen. 

The kitchen was in much the same state that it always was, which was to say in a form of organized chaos that at one time Holster had informed him only made sense to Bitty. By the end of the last year, Will had begun to understand the system, and being the only one outside of Bitty to get the pattern made him feel odd in a way he wasn’t sure how to interpret. 

“What are you making?”

“Cookies!” Bitty told him cheerfully as he peeked into the oven. There was a tray on the top rack. 

“They don’t look done.”

“They’re not.” Bitty let the oven door close and pulled off his mitt with an effortless sort of flair that Will knew no one else would ever possess. “But they only need another minute or two. In the meantime I have a lot more work to do, and I need your help.”

“Do you really?”

Bitty smacked him with the oven mitt in the arm as he passed. “You’re the best I’ve got, so you’ll have to do.”

Will grinned, rubbing at the back of his neck as he took in the multitude of baking supplies littering the kitchen counter. “I guess I can help, if you really can’t rope anyone else into it.”

“That’s the spirit.” Bitty motioned with the mitt still in his hand to a bowl of chocolate batter sitting on the counter. “Can you stir that? I’ve got three more batches that need to go in and I want to keep it moving.”

“Three more that need to go in, or three more that you want to go in so you don’t have to start whatever it is you’re trying not to start?”

This time he moved quick enough to avoid the mitt and slipped to the side to pick up the bowl. There was already a wooden spoon in the batter and he held both up as a shield to stop Bitty from attempting any further attacks. 

Bitty rolled his eyes but didn’t try to hide his smile as he opened the oven again.

Will bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing, and turned his back on Bitty so he couldn’t see his grin.

Napping and unpacking could wait. 

**_12/31/16_ **

It wasn’t that Will didn’t like being alone with his father, not really anyway. He loved his father and looked up to him more than anyone in his life. He wanted to be everything that he was and tried to consider what his father would do in any given situation. 

The problem was that in pretty much any situation Will tended to panic and forget what his father would do, and usually ended up doing the opposite. He was so unlike his father that it burned in his chest sometimes, and he felt like it was blaringly obvious to every member of his family any time they were in a room together.

“So how’s school going?” It was Jacob Poindexter who finally broke the silence first, his breath rising in a cloud of steam as they both stared out over the back porch, and into the woods. He could hear the waves crashing against the shore farther off, but he couldn’t see the ocean. 

“Yeah,” Will answered, an instinctive reaction that he realized a second too late wasn’t an appropriate response. “Uh, I mean, it’s fine.” He wished he had a drink in his hand to give him something to do other than shove his hands in his pockets and feel awkward. 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw his father nod. “Your grades okay?”

He nodded back, still facing out. When he leaned back his shoulder blades touched the wood of the house, and he could just hear the chatter happening on the other side of the wall. Half of him was thrilled to be spending time alone with his father, the other half was dying to go back inside. 

“Yeah, I’m doing good.”

For almost a full minute, everything was silent. 

“You know…” there was a halting tone to hit father’s voice, like he was unsure of the words himself. Everything about it made Will uncomfortable. “You don’t have to make…Valdicta-Whatever. You just gotta graduate, alright? Don’t get kicked off that team, and don’t fail out. That’s all you gotta do, yeah? It’s all we expect.”

Will knew, deep down that this was a heartfelt talk to his father. He might have meant it to be reassuring or to make Will feel better, or maybe he just wanted to make sure it had been drilled into him not to let his family down.

He just wished that maybe his family had slightly higher expectations for him. Or maybe just any sort of expectation at all. 

**_2/8/17_ **

Will was going to die.

He was only two weeks into the semester and already Organic Chemistry was going to end his life. It couldn’t be this hard. No one else in the class could possibly be struggling this hard. Two weeks, he told himself again. Two weeks and he was already drowning under five text books in the library and half a million papers, all covered in equations and numbers that barely made any sort of sense. Science and math had always been his strength, or at least he had thought so until Orgo Chem 3 decided it wanted to destroy his entire life. 

The quiz was tomorrow. The quiz, not even important enough to be considered a test and yet he was still going to fail it and then he was going to fail the class and then he was going to lose his scholarship and he was going to fail out and his parents were going to be so disappointed in him and-

“Hey, Dex.” 

He jumped at the voice, pulling his head out of his hands. It was nearing 1 AM and the library was almost empty. There was a student librarian sitting at her desk across the room, her chin in one hand as she clicked at something on the screen in front of her. Other than her there was only one other person in the room, standing at the edge of the long wooden table and looking wildly uncomfortable. 

“Hey, Connor. What, uh, what are you doing here?”

Whiskey tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at the papers in front of Will for a minute too long before looking back up at his face. “I needed a book for tomorrow and I was already up so I thought fuck it. What are you working on?”

Will rubbed at his face, trying to school his expression into something other than the panic and defeat currently bubbling up in his chest and threatening to spill over into something unhelpful. “Uh, orgo. Got a quiz tomorrow.”

Whiskey nodded, bobbing his head up and down a little too quickly. He was clutching his bag too hard and trying very hard to look casual. It was pretty on par as far as Whiskey’s typical strange behavior went, so Will thought maybe he was a better actor than he thought.

“Right, uh, I’ll let you get back to it.” Whiskey rapped one hand on the wooden desk and headed for the door. 

With a sigh Will returned to the work in front of him. He had only managed to reread the same sentence three times before he was stopped again.

“Do you want help?”

Will blinked at the papers in front of him, his fried brain not processing the words for a minute before he looked up. Whiskey hadn’t moved very far, only a few feet at most. He was only half turned back, still facing the door like he hadn’t wanted to ask the question. Embarrassment burned in Will’s face, a hot sort of humiliation that he could feel creeping down his neck and over his ears. Whiskey didn’t want to help him, he had just looked so pathetic and stupid that an underclassman had felt the need to pretend. 

Whiskey had felt the need to try to help him. 

Jesus. 

Will shifted in his seat, unable to meet Whiskey’s eye. “I’m fine.”

Whiskey didn’t move for almost a minute, and Will didn’t attempt to look up. The equations didn’t make any more sense the more he stared at them, and Whiskey’s presence wasn’t helping. 

Finally, Whiskey hiked his bag up further, but rather than head towards the door, he made his way around the table, letting his bag fall to the floor as he took up the seat next to Will. “I’m really fucking good at chemistry, okay, don’t make it weird.” He took the book Will had been staring at and glanced over it. “Tell me what your quiz is on, and I can help.”

“I said I’m fine. You don’t have to.”

“I know, and I want to, so like I said, don’t make it weird.” 

Will could feel the heat in his face and the shame of admitting defeat burning across his face. He tapped his fingers against the desk as he tried to stop his leg from bouncing. Next to him Whiskey was stiff and equally as awkward. His face looked darker than usual, and Will thought he might have been blushing. 

Whiskey glanced sideways, and despite how prepared he appeared for a fight in the middle of the library, the exact same anxiety Will could feel inside of him was now starring back him from across his chemistry notes. He sighed, letting his leg bounce as he pushed his chair closer to Whiskey’s and tried to let go of his nerves. If he didn’t admit defeat now, he was going to fail later and common sense told him the ego hit now would be nothing compared to what was to come if he didn’t accept the help. 

Not that he thought Whiskey was going to tell anyone. So maybe it wouldn’t be too humiliating after all. 

“It’s like…every fucking equation. The numbers are all blending together.”

Whiskey relaxed, but only minimally. “It’s because you’re panicking, just take it easy and it makes sense.” Whiskey flipped the page and Will went over his notes and they didn’t move until almost three. 

The B minus he received had still somehow didn’t feel like a win. He should have done better from the start, and all that studying hadn’t gotten him much.  
When he showed the grade to Whiskey, the punch in the arm and smile he had received had felt like a victory anyway. 

**_12/24/16_ **

“All that college hockey’s been good for you.” 

Will grinned as his grandmother poked at his arm, flinching only slightly at the contact. 

“You look good, like you’ve actually been eating.”

“Upgraded from twig to sapling,” his cousin Heather teased. He threw a rude gesture at her as she stuck out her tongue and ducked back into the kitchen. 

His mother was on in the next moment, tugging lightly at the slight curl that had begun to form at the base of his neck. “Finally eating and now he’s not cutting his hair.”

“It’s always something with boys.”

“Oh, it really is. Trying to grow a ponytail and break his mother’s heart in two.”

“That’s the plan, Ma,” he told her with a grin. “Gonna drop acid and join the hippies.”

“Just like Aunt Janice!” 

“HEY!” 

Two of his younger cousins dodged around his legs, and he grabbed the banister for balance as they rushed past to try to get to their presents first. “Watch it,” he chided, with only enough heat to make one of them offer a halfhearted apology.

He was about to follow when his grandmother grabbed him by the elbow, pulling gently to let him know she wanted him to lean down. “I’m so proud of you for going to college.”

He made a noncommittal noise, his hands itching to rub the back of his neck as she held him in place, his face hot from the number of people in the room and attention she was giving him. “You didn’t get your father’s looks like your brother did, but you don’t need a pretty face if you’ve got a good job and your health,” she told him with a loving smile that left him feeling conflicted. She raised one hand to gently pat at his cheek with one last fond glance before she turned to grab another one of his cousins and drag them into another conversation. 

Will straightened up, a strange feeling in his stomach. She was proud of him, he reminded himself, they were all proud of him for all their teasing. She was right after all, looks didn’t matter in the long run, the job and his health were the most important things. They were all that mattered.

The following day his cousin posted a picture of him and his brother to Facebook, and Will had spent a half hour comparing their differences in his head. 

**_2/21/17_ **

“What do you need?”

Ford jumped, like somehow she had missed his slamming open the door and stomping across the room to meet her. There was no one else even in the vacant classroom to disguise the noise. He had only been to this side of campus for Lardo’s art projects, usually to help her move and or lift something. When Ford had texted him to meet her here, he had assumed it was a similar situation. The only things in the room were a few tables pressed against the walls, and a single stool sitting in front of a black backdrop that had been tacked into the wall. Three white panels had been set up around the stool, and while Will didn’t know much about it, he could still guess it was for some sort of photo shoot. 

“Dex!” She hopped to her feet, from where she had been sitting on the nearest table, legs crossed over one another and examining something in her hands. “Good, you’re here.”

“What are we movin’?” 

Ford moved past him to the stool, casting him a confused glance over her shoulder before she shifted one of the panels. “Um, nothing?”

Will frowned at her, crossing his arms over his chest. “So what am I doing?”

Ford whipped around suddenly, holding up her digital camera close to her face like she was peering through the view at him and made a clicking sound. “Taking your shirt off so I can get your picture.” 

Ford turned back around, like what she just said was normal and not at all bizarre, and continued to adjust the panel. Will froze, a flash of panic rooting him on the spot as he tried to process what she was saying. He caught sight of his reflection in the window and the color of his face was atrocious. Shaking his arms out he managed to move enough to rub at his face, trying to send the blood pooling in his cheeks back where it belonged. He had heard her wrong, or he had misunderstood.

“Uh…what?”

Satisfied with the panel, Ford turned back to him, her eyes wide and innocent behind her thick frames. Not that he was fooled by it. Ford was younger and a little less experienced, but she had all the ferocity that Lardo had possessed, just slightly better disguised. Right now, however, his fear of her had little to do with how loud she could scream or her hawk-like attention to detail. 

“Oh!” There appeared to be genuine embarrassment on her face as she laughed, covering her face with one hand. She peered at him through her fingers. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry! I thought one of the other guys had told you, wow that probably sounded weird out of context. I already got Wicky and Nursey.” She shifted her camera so she could gesture with one hand. “It’s not weird, I promise. I’m taking a photography class and I’m doing a set of people around campus I know. I’m working with shadows and skin tones, so I’m trying to get all different shades and different lighting. Shirtless just makes it look better." She adjusted something on the camera and seemed somehow still oblivious to Will’s confusion and anxiety. “Basically I’m just asking all the best looking people I know to pose nude for me,” she told him with a conspiring wink. “Or, well, half nude. I love all of you guys but I’m not ready for all that yet.” She raised her eyebrows at the camera and snickered at her own joke. 

Will still hadn’t moved, and his brain hadn’t even come close to catching up.

“You…think I’m good looking?” 

Ford pursed her lips and shot him a look that reminded him of Lardo out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t try to make this something, Dex.”

If possible, his face burned even hotter. “I’m not trying to.” 

She sighed, like this was taking a lot more time than she had anticipated. “Yes, Dex, you’re objectively a good looking dude and that’s all your getting, so quit fishing and take your shirt off so we can get out of here. Someone else has the space at 6.” 

“I…” The room was kind of cold actually, it was February and he wouldn’t be surprised to learn Samwell hadn’t bothered to heat the entire building. Will, however, felt like he was about to boil over and melt into the floor. “Wasn’t fishing.”

Ford glanced up again, that same agitated worry line appearing between her eyes. Just as quickly as it appeared it was gone, her eyes going wide and lips parting as something like fear crossed her expression instead. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t even ask did I? I’m sorry, I’ve gotten so used to theater people and the rest of the team here, like the other guys are always just so…out there you know? None of them even hesitated, but I guess that’s not really like you? Wow, I’m sorry, this was super rude and you’re obviously super uncomfortable and I’m really sorry.” She pulled a face, biting down on her tongue. “Do you want to do this? You can totally leave your shirt on, it’s fine. But you don’t have to do it at all if you don’t want to. You will have to help me wrangle Tango in here though.”

Will paused for what he realized was about thirty seconds too long before he shrugged. His face was still hot and his own embarrassment was still curling in his stomach, but the smile on his face wasn’t forced. Before he could change his mind he grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled it off. 

No one was going to say William Poindexter backed down from a challenge that Nursey and Wicks had accepted. 

“So that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” He asked as he made his way over to the stool, unable to quite meet Ford’s eye. “It’s all a rouse to get Tango shirtless.”

Ford scoffed, lifting the camera and looking through it. “Obviously. Saw right through me.” She took a shot and he squinted against the flash. 

“I’m sure that’s flattering.”

“You’re beautiful Dex, don’t worry. Also I’m just taking shots to get the lighting right.”

Will inhaled as deep as he could, eyes still on the floor. Breathe in breathe out and don’t think about what your brother would say. It was relatively common mantra for him. 

“Nursey was right, I should listen to him more often.”

“No one should listen to Nursey more often,” Will told her, on instinct more than anything. “What did he say?” 

She clicked something on the camera and stared in deep concentration at the screen. “He’s the one who suggested the black background for you. He said it would make your freckles stand out against your skin better.” She shot him a grin before she raised the camera again. “His exact words were ‘he’s gonna look like a fuckin’ faerie prince and it’s gonna be sick’.” She threw up a peace sign and for some reason her accent was a poor imitation of a surfer.

Will’s head was spinning and suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room. Like his head was going to float right off his body. “That is exactly what he sounds like,” he told her, his voice sounding too light to his own ears. He met her eyes over the camera easily, far too many other things happening in his head to be self-conscious about what was happening. 

Ford laughed. When she raised the camera and took the first picture, Will couldn’t help but laugh too. 

**_1/14/17_ **

William Poindexter loves his family. 

There was nothing to dispute about that fact. It was an unshakeable foundation at the core of who he was. His family was his life and they would always be his home. It was exactly the deep heartfelt sort of statement that went unspoken throughout the Poindexter household, because if he was to say something so mushy and ridiculous his father would probably not be able to look him in the eye for at least a day and his brother would probably be justified in shoving his face on the dirty floor of their uncle’s boat. 

So it remained unspoken, but it ran deep anyway. 

“I’m headin’ out,” he told his mother with as little ceremony as he could muster, one bag over his shoulder and the other heavy on the other end of a strap in his hand. “Be back for Easter.” 

His mother had been busy with something, because she was always busy with something even if she always refused to elaborate on the details of what that something was. She slammed a drawer hard enough that Will heard the cutlery rattle inside. For a moment she just blinked at him, her eyes too wide behind the thick frames of her glasses and her hair too wild for the thin strip of ribbon attempting to hold it back. There was still a crease in her brow and a tension in her shoulders that didn’t lend well to a soft goodbye. It was the leftover remnants of the fight Will had tried not to listen to her have with his father less than an hour ago. 

Not that Shannon Poindexter had anything soft about her any other time of the day. 

“Ya better be,” she told him, her grin splitting her face wide. The fight wasn’t gone from her shoulders and there was still something hard in her eyes, but none of that ever really fully dissipated. Will didn’t move, stood still in the doorway to the kitchen, waiting and trying not to make it seem like he was. “You miss church enough that you better be on your knees from Good Friday till Easter morn.” 

Had Craig been in the room he would have made a joke of that, and not even the plethora of kitchen tools within arm’s reach of their mother would have been enough to stop him. Will was not his brother though, and he only repressed a smile and gave a short nod. “Right, will do.” 

His mother wrinkled her nose at him in a fond sort of expression and neither of them moved for a moment. Will pretended again that he wasn’t waiting for anything. 

Finally his mother shifted, a whole body motion that she put far more drama into than was necessary and threw herself towards him. “Come here.” She wrapped one arm around him and pulled him down by the ear so she could smack a kiss against his cheek. She patted his face hard before stepping back. Will fought down his grin at the affection, hiding it behind his hand as he pretended to wipe it off of his face and had an annoyed scowl firmly in place when he lowered it again. 

“Ma,” he complained. She hadn’t really hugged him, and he told himself very firmly that he wasn’t disappointed. 

“Go say goodbye to your father before you fuck off for another four months.”

“It’s two and a fucking half.”

“Watch your mouth,” she snapped over her shoulder as she returned to the empty pots and pans she had been shuffling around. 

“Yeah, yeah.”  
He waited until her back was turned before he turned his and headed out through the living room. 

“I’m leavin’,” he announced as he knocked open the screen door with his hip, calling out even before he could see his father and Craig standing at the foot of the slanting porch. They looked eerily alike, standing with their backs to him. They each had one hand in their pocket and the other curled around an amber bottle missing a label. Their attention was fixed on the broken down old Mustang that was currently hogging up all the space in their driveway. His father’s truck was parked behind it, and Will’s Jeep was up on the curb. 

He didn’t quite understand why the Mustang couldn’t sit on the curb. It only had three functioning tires and no breaks, so it wasn’t exactly going anywhere anytime soon. There wasn’t much more damage anyone could do to the chipping orange paint either. 

It was still the ghost of a once beautiful car, Will had to admit. 

Craig glanced over his shoulder, arching his eyebrows in way of a greeting before looking back at the car. “Jake said I’m gonna have to replace the entire bottom of the frame before it’ll pass inspection.” 

Their father snorted, taking another swig from his bottle as Will came to join them. “Jake’s just looking to make an extra buck from you. All you need is a piece of sheet metal welded to the rusted out section and you’ll be good.” 

“I think it’s gonna need a hell of a lot more than a piece of metal,” Will countered. 

His father huffed a laugh as Craig scowled. “You’re on the nose there.” 

“You’re headin’ out?” Craig asked as their father turned back to the dirty old cooler Will had just stepped over on the steps.

“Yeah.” Will shifted his bag higher on his shoulder. “Practice starts on Sunday and I want a day to get my shit settled in.” 

He jumped as something cold touched his hand, and just barely managed not to drop the bottle his father passed to him. He had his fingers curled around the base as Craig grabbed it by the neck, popping it open with a ring on his keychain before he moved to inspect some element of back window. 

“Uh,” Will watched as the foam rose dangerously close to the lip of the bottle. “I’m just about to go.”

His father rolled one shoulder in a half shrug, shooting him a look out of the corner of his eye that made Will glance at the ground. “Better drink it quick then.”

Neither of them were looking at him, both sets of eyes fixed on the beautiful piece of junk in front of them, but he could feel the scrutiny anyway. Jacob Poindexter would never ask him to stay, never tell him he missed him or he couldn’t wait to see him again, but offering him a beer for the road was about the closest he would ever come. To turn the offer down went against everything Will had been trying for twenty years to accomplish with his father. 

It wasn’t like he had ever had a problem with this before, wasn’t like he had never shared a beer with them right before taking off before. 

He took a sip and ignored the voice in his head that sounded like Bitty shouting at him. 

“Another year for our frat boy over here,” Craig teased as Will tried to ignore the burn in his throat that had nothing to do with the taste of alcohol. 

“Not in a fuckin’ frat.”

“And you better keep it that way,” he father warned, casting a warning glance over the dented hood. “All them rich boys living together and partying like that all the time? They ain’t going nowhere unless their daddies are paying for it.”

“Yeah, ain’t a lot of room for studying when you’ve gotta spend all that quality time with your frat brothers.” Craig made a hand motion that left no room for imagination as to what he meant by ‘quality time’. Their father huffed another laugh as Craig cackled, and Will took another sip just to chase down the bile in his throat. 

If Shitty were here, Will thought, he would say something. Would tell Craig why that was a fucked up thing to insinuate and to laugh about. Will felt very strongly that someone should tell Craig it wasn’t okay, but it was more an abstract concept than a real thought. There was only one person present who could say something like that, and he would rather eat the glass in his hand than say one word. 

He laughed, and it hurt. 

“Nah, it’s not quite like that. Not sure I really fit in anyway.”

“Why did you pick that school anyway?” Craig asked, crossing his ankles as he leaned back against the car. “Like, you knew what its reputation was before you even got on that tour and you still went.” There was no hostility in his tone, which for some reason made Will feel even more sick. There was nothing but genuine curiosity, a complete disbelief in what could have possibly made him consider Samwell in the first place. 

“Scholarship was good.”

“Yeah, but-“

“I don’t give a fuck if you go to the goddamn queerest school in fuckin’ Paris.” His father spit the word, like the entire city itself was a curse word. “As long as you do better than you did in high school, it might be worth it. A college degree means something, even if you just scrape by.”

“What’s the saying? D’s get degrees? You’ll be golden.”

“It’s C’s get degrees,” Will corrected. When he looked at the bottle, the liquid hadn’t even receded past the neck.

Craig frowned, scrunching up his nose in much the same expression as their mother. “That might be harder for you.”

Will scowled but didn’t say anything. 

He took one more sip and then they were discussing the exhaust, Craig moving to his hands and knees to look at something under the car and Will made his move. He dumped the rest of the beer into the bushes and sat the mostly empty bottle on the porch railing. “I’m out,” he announced. Craig waved from under the car and his father shot him one last passing glance. 

“See you at Easter. Stay out of trouble. Don’t get anyone pregnant.”

“And if you do, at least make sure she’s at least not too much white trash.”

Will laughed again, the same burning in his throat and turned to make the hike up to his car. 

When he slammed the driver’s side door shut, his hands gripped the steering wheel with a bruising force for a few seconds before he found it in himself to start the engine. 

Will loved his family, and he would miss them, but sometimes he had to remind himself. 

**_3/1/17_ **

“DEX!” 

Will thought for a moment he imagined the sound, or maybe that the wind was playing tricks on him against the gutters, and then it came again, louder this time. 

“DEX!” 

Will pushed his chair back, leaning back until he was even with the bathroom door. 

“Uh…CHOWDER?”

“DEX!” Chowder called again, through what sounded like both bathroom doors. Will pushed his chair back in place with a haggard sigh that he hoped Chowder could hear, and made his way to the bathroom. 

“What do you want?” He asked as he opened the second connecting door. 

Chowder beamed at him from the middle of his bed. There was a Sharks blanket wrapped around his feet, and his laptop was resting comfortably on his lap. “Hey, Dex!”

Will frowned, but there was no hint of anger behind it. “What do you want?”

“I want to show you this video, but I didn’t want to get up.”

“Why couldn’t you just text it to me?” 

“You were like, fifteen feet away.” 

“Why couldn’t you just text me to come over then?”

“What did I just say?” 

Will sighed even louder, and he made sure to jostle Chowder as much as possible when he flopped down next to him on the bed. 

“No, Rupert!” Chowder dove sideways off the bed to save his stuffed shark a second after it toppled off the bed. Will reached out to grab Chowder by the leg before he could suffer the same fate. “How could you?” Chowder bemoaned from somewhere nearly under his bed, almost kicking Will in the face as he attempted to right himself. 

“You did this to yourself.”

“Rupert did nothing to anyone.”

“Well maybe he should start pulling his weight,” Will countered as he rose to his knees. Holding onto Chowder with one hand and pushing the laptop to safety with the other. He leaned over Chowder, reaching his hand out to grab the hand making grabbing motions at him. With a heave he managed to get his friend fully back on the bed, Rupert the Shark in tow. 

Or Rupert was in tow, until he was suddenly being shoved in Will’s face with all the force Chowder could muster. 

“APOLOGIZE TO RUPERT!”

“AH, FUCK, GET OFF OF ME!”

“Yo, I think I watched this exact video last night.”

Chowder and Will both froze in their struggle, eyes wide as they turned to look at Nursey standing in the doorway to the open bathroom. He smirked at them both, his arms crossed as he leaned against the doorway. He looked like a tool, Will thought, with his tank top in the middle of winter and one perfect curl of hair falling down over his forehead. It looked effortless, but Will knew for a fact he was meticulous about it. 

He looked ridiculously good and it only made Will more annoyed.

“Stop telling us about your porn preferences.”

“Why was there a shark in your porn? That’s really specific.”

“Are you saying all of your porn doesn’t have sharks in it? Because honestly that’s what I always expected-“ Will wasn’t able to finish his teasing before Chowder doubled his attack, shoving Rupert in his face so hard it was difficult to breathe. 

“Chowder’s version of porn is just sharks swimming around while pop music is playing in the background.”

“Okay, first of all, that sounds awesome. Second of all, I watch normal porn, just like you guys.”

“What the fuck is ‘normal’ porn?”

Will managed to get part of his mouth free of the stuffed animal currently being shoved into it. “I’m gonna need you to get the fuck off of me if you’re gonna be talking about porn.”

“Everyone get on Dex and talk about porn!”

“NO!” 

Will was still blinded by the grey blob pressing down on him, but he felt the bed shift and then a second weight settle hard on his chest in what he could only assume was Nursey piling himself on. 

“GET OFF I HATE BOTH OF YOU!”

“DON’T YOU LEAVE RUPERT OUT OF THIS!”

“FUCK RUPERT!”

Chowder gasped and Nursey made a sound of mock horror and suddenly it was a full out fight. Somehow Chowder kicked him in the back of the knee and Nursey was sitting on his back and the stupid shark was on the ground again anyway. He was going to have bruises tomorrow, and his pride was probably never going to recover from how many times he was being sat on. 

He was laughing so hard he could feel the tears on his cheeks.

“GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME!” He shouted for the umpteenth time, finally managing to dislodge Nursey and tried to put as much ferocity into his glare as a man trying not to continue laughing could. He didn’t think he was succeeding if Nursey’s continued grin was anything to go by. 

Nursey opened his mouth, no doubt something inappropriate on the tip of his tongue, but in the two seconds he took to take a breath, Will turned his attention back to Chowder and cut him off before he began.

“Didn’t you want to show me something?”

Chowder perked up, relaxing back from where he had raised his fists in the mockery of a fight, all horseplay draining out of him in a split second. “Oh yeah!” He grabbed his laptop, which had somehow managed to not find itself broken on the floor in the scuffle, and pulled it into his lap, the screen titled so that Will could see.

Nursey flopped back down on his stomach, cushioning his head with his arms crossed over Will's chest.

“Dude-“

“Shh, just let it happen.”

“Both of you shut up, you’ve gotta watch this.”

The video, for all the preamble it had received, wasn’t really that funny. But Chowder was laughing a disproportionate amount and he could feel Nursey snicker, the movement jostling them both. Chowder leaned back, one leg resting against Will’s, and Nursey’s skin was warm through the fabric of his tee shirt. 

For just a minute, in the middle of their domesticity, Will felt his chest tighten in anxiety. They were both too close and too comfortable with him, and they knew him too well. It was a strange and foreign feeling and for the life of him he couldn’t understand how it had happened so stealthily. It hadn’t happened overnight, they hadn’t figured him out so well over the course of a conversation or two. It had been two and a half years, and this team had become his friends, his family, and his home. It was almost too much to handle. He wanted to bolt, he wanted to get out or tell them both off for it.

And then the cat on the screen fell off of a table and Chowder laughed so hard he snorted and almost toppled off the bed and Nursey had to throw out an arm to keep him upright, which only resulted in Nursey going off the bed and Will scrambling for purchase on the sheets. 

Chowder and Nursey were fighting on the floor, and the cat video was still playing and as Will tried to stop himself from laughing like an idiot, he thought that while he loved his family, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to find a new place to call home.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what I'm doing. How do you write soft things??? The world may never know. 
> 
>  
> 
> [ **Tumblr.** ](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/)


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